About

Part way through my second voluntary combat tour in Vietnam, in 1967, I was abruptly assigned to what I was told was a Civic Action post in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. As an Infantry Captain I had been assigned to a Special Forces reconnaissance project in the Vietnamese Highlands 25 miles West of Pleiku near the Cambodian border. I was the Operations Officer for seven 5 man teams and a 1000 man support force of Montagnard Tribesmen of the Rhade Tribe. With 20 Americans and five Australians we were primed for action I had just ordered in a B-52 Strike on a target of opportunity resulting in many pieces of many bodies and hundreds of blood trails into Cambodia resulting in Kudos from my superiors. http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id919.html

Unannounced landed Lieutenant General Ray Peers who demanded the use of my eight helicopters for support of a 4th Infantry Division combat operation. I refused, politely, and he stomped off to his helicopter and left. Most Captains do not tell two star generals ‘no’. But I had recon teams on the border with body snatch missions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail which brought supplies from North Vietnam to support the resistance movement in South Vietnam and if they became compromised or captured a North Vietnamese Army soldier and I was without the means to extract either of the five man teams I would have had a mutiny on my hands by some very crusty combat veterans. Three days later I was in Saigon. http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id1.html